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Child friendly museums: Deutsches Museum, München

Children learn through touch. Even adults understand things better when their sense of touch is stimulated. Just imagine a museum of technology (any kind of technology!) in which you are allowed to touch most of the displayed objects, to discover, to experiment: what can be more interesting for a child and their family?

Deutsches Museum in München is hosted in a huge building, with an inner yard, not exactly in the centre of the city, but in an accessible area, where there are enough parking lots. After entering the museum, we can notice and understand various physical phenomena and follow the development of technology on many levels. The exhibition presents electrostatic phenomena: the famous experiment with the measure of length which we rub against our clothes and when we place it close to our heads we see that it attracts the hairs (who hasn’t already done it in school can try to do it now!), optical phenomena: how we see through various convex, concave lenses, etc., important achievements in the history of technology: the invention of the train, of the phone, of oil wells, of planes, of cars, of the satellites, of music instruments, of medical technical equipment… almost everything which crosses your mind when you think of technology. And now the best part: almost EVERYTHING can be experimented and tested; visitors can do short experiments or get on various cars, trains, the command desks of some train stations, hydroelectric power plants, telephone stations, etc.

In this absolutely amazing place we stayed almost half a day, without seeing all the things we could have seen and without getting bored (although the youngest member of our group was three). The children got tired by climbing up cockpits of fighter aircrafts, getting in vintage vehicles, in racing cars, on ships, on tanks. We saw a section into a plane and a section into a satellite (we could not get into them because they were suspended) and we understood what is behind and above us when we are on a plane. As if this hadn’t been enough, at the basement there was an area dedicated to children (!!!) where they could do experiments with water, they could understand moon phases and the rotation of the Earth, while they were in its position (they were the Earth), they could get into the huge resonance box of a guitar in order to understand sound propagation, etc., etc., etc.

Therefore, Deutsches Museum in München can easily become a vacation spot itself, it’s a museum which one does not visit only once if one happens to be there. The visit can be finished in the museum shop which is always buzzing, because it has innumerable souvenirs and games stimulating logical thinking and curiosity.

It’s a perfect place for the whole family, every member of the family has something to do, having at their disposal everything they need in order to fulfill their physiological needs: restaurants, toilets, relaxation spaces, etc.

I was thrilled (among other things) to test my pulmonary capacity (I feel fine and I don’t suffer from asthma), my child didn’t understand why, a few weeks after that visit, when we visited a similar museum in Romania, he cannot touch anything or get in any vehicle, the adults in the group were impressed at the area dedicated to aerospatial technology and at the area of experiments designed for children and of dioramas. They also noticed the organic way in which the coming out of use of a technology normally leads to its placement into a museum: the telephone exchange, the control console of a plant, a furnace, etc., before arriving in front of us, had been used for years, and the patina and the visible wear made them more valuable, completing the experience.

In conclusion, YES, we recommend Deutsches Museum in München for the whole family, from small children (2-3 years old) to 99 + people.